Remediation Through the Ages

• 9 years ago
• Posted in:Mechanization: before and after, Post 2, Re: Module 3
• 2
• Author: jkdaina
• Tags: remediation

Here we are in what Jay Bolter calls the late age of print (Bolter, 2001). As we transition into the electronic age, it is worth a look at how previous technologies evolved and how they paid homage to their predecessors.

Enter Remediation. Bolter and colleague Richard Grusin wrote a book titled Remediation before Bolter published the second edition of Writing Spaces. In a 1996 paper by the same name, they remind us:

“The word derives ultimately from the Latin remederi–to heal, to restore to health–and we have adopted the word to express the way in which one medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another.”

I started making connections, by no means exhaustive or linear; there were secondary technologies between dominant stages (Bolter, 2001). As early as 220AD, lawyers were concerning themselves with various kinds of books, the codex being among them. (UBC, 2015)

Papyrus, meet Parchment. From plant-based to animal-based surfaces, both served writers’ needs in very much the same way. (Bar-Ilan, 1995)

Parchment, meet Ground Paper. Paving the way for modern paper, the Chinese invention eventually replaced papyrus and writing surfaces returned to a plant-based format. (Bar-Ilan, 1995) On these, scribes remediated the spaces they inherited with “word division, punctuation, rubrication (decorated initial letters), headings, and letter styles to organize the text visually on the page.” (Bolter, 2001)

Scroll, meet Codex. The Codex may have shifted text from continuous to discontinuous (pages), but in which ways might Codex have remediated Scroll? It doesn’t seem it was immediately replaced (preferences ranged from Judaic traditions for scroll and classical literature for codex). Skilled reading manipulations “were well developed in both roll and codex reading.” (Frost, 2002). This is the most mysterious jump; perhaps handwriting itself was the remediating thread.

Palimpsest: Text, meet text. Why invent a new technology when the old one can be recycled? The palimpsest manuscript was a repurposing of parchment for new textual purposes (Keep et al, 2000). In the case of spiritual motives, the format (re)mediated itself towards a new function.

Manuscript, meet Common Place Book. Manuscripts remained popular even as the printing press grew. One of the manuscript cultures (alongside others) that emerged among the aristocracy was the Common Place Book, in which poetry was copied; print “carried a taint of the common and the mass.” (Keep et al, 2000) I am particularly struck by the parallel between women writers of the court at this time being restricted from entering the world of moveable type. It sounds familiar, with barriers on women in high-tech and start-up circles today.

Codex, Meet Moveable Type. Bookbinding was popular for centuries, so printed books had to remediate. Gutenberg integrated the existing economy of writing by “striving to make his product look as much like the medium it was replacing as possible through the use of cursive typefaces, which imitated handwriting.” (UBC, 2015)

Journal, meet blog. Album Amicorum, meet Facebook. The list goes on as the spectrum grows.

Photography remediated painting. Films remediated books. Photoshop remediated the darkroom. Today, the Web remediates film, music and print. SMART boards remediate the chalkboard. Virtual reality remediates film. Dare I say iPads remediate everything?

I really enjoyed this exploration!

Julia

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Works Cited

Bar-Ilan, M. (1995). Papyrus. Retrieved June 28, 2015 from https://faculty.biu.ac.il/%7Ebarilm/papyrus.html

Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print [2nd edition]. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard A. (1996). “Remediation.” Configurations 4.3, 311-358. The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for Literature and Science. Retrieved June 28, 2015 from http://muse.jhu.edu.gtel.gatech.edu:2048/journals/configurations/v004/4.3bolter.html

Frost, Gary. (2002). futureofthebook.com. Retrieved June 28, 2015 from https://web.archive.org/web/20060511022155/http://www.futureofthebook.com/storiestoc/scroll

Keep, C., McLaughlin, T., & Parmar, R. (2000). “Literary Formats from Manuscripts to Electronic Texts.” The electronic labrynth. Retrieved June 28, 2015 from http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0261.html

Milk, Chris. (2015). “How Virtual Reality Can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine.” TED Talk. Accessed June 28, 2015 from http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine

Parker, Clifton B. (2014). “The technology industry needs more women innovators, Stanford expert says.” Stanford News. September 9, 2014. Accessed June 28, 2015 from http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/september/tech-gender-gap-090914.html

UBC. (2015). Module 03: Discovering Modern Literacy. Economies of writing; Or, writing about writing. Spring 2015 [Online Course Content].

Image Credit

Tablet image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing; iPad image courtesy of Apple.